[cairo] A small GUI toolkit based on Cairo

[lupinsky at uiuc.edu]

I've been working on an application leveraging wxWidgets and 
cairo (among other libraries). I am hoping to write a basic 
minimal toolkit that would allow me to have animated 
transitions and more importantly smooth graphics.
After reading Timothée Lecomte's thread about the "best 
strategy" for drawing using wxWidgets and cairo I have 
decided to have a one big back-buffer that would be 
recreated whenever the main window is resized.

I would like to have several different element types (or 
controls) that are rendered onto the back-buffer. Assuming I 
have an element of type "edit control" placed at a certain 
position, is there any way I could provide a smaller part of 
the larger surface without copying back and forth? I would 
like to have only one back-buffer for the "root" window.

Specifically, I intend on having an "Element::OnRender" 
virtual method that a programmer would have to implement and 
I would like to provide (as a parameter) a context that only 
encapsulates the part of the surface that belongs to the 
particular control. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Idan